ut his art is sounder, and his
delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste
for his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his
humor will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in
another particular: he described the life of the upper classes, and
Dickens of the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer
material to the novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in
strong, native developments of character. It is true, also, that
Thackeray approached "society" rather to satirize it than to set forth
its agreeableness. Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he
describes, that world upon which the broadening and refining processes
of a high civilization have done their utmost, and which, consequently,
must possess an intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life
of London thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is {277}
the equal of Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of
Scott as a novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott
had in a high degree---is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains
above my eyes," he said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is
wanting in his creations that final charm which Shakspere's have. For
what the eyes see is not all.

The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a
humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that
crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams, only because their
wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with
Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter
of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early
letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.
Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the
Christian belief, she carried into Positivism the same religious
earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:

"O, let me join the choir invisible," etc.

Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_,
1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the
Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a
connection--a marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes,
who was, like {278} herself, a freethinker, and who published, among
other things, a _Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had als